No doubt there are huge sighs of relief that Discovery is home. One question now is bugging me. Can the shuttle fly like an ordinary aircraft, ie take off from a runway. If not why not and how are they going to get it from Edwards AFB back to Florida.

Ok I admit I forgot about the 747. Same idea as the Buran and the An-225. Why could it not be made to fly normally like a delta wing shaped aircraft like Concorde. Is this to do with heat shield tiles and engine/rocket types?

From the moment of the De-orbit burn which occurs roughly an hour before scheduled touchdown, to get the shuttle into the right position for reentry (a 40 degree nose up angle) and at 17,000 mph, there is no engine use. From that moment forward the shuttle becomes the most sophisticated glider ever built. To decelerate the shuttle goes through a series of left and right banks after reentry. It goes subsonic approximately 25 miles away from the landing facility and approximately 4 minutes before touchdown. From that moment, the shuttle commander (in the case of STS-114, Eileen Collins) "flies" the craft in manually. People seem to often misunderstand that they only get one shot at this. Either way, that shuttle is going to hit the ground on that pass, regardless of whether or not its on the runway. If they miscalculate by a second during their last few orbits, it'll wind up missing the runway by miles. I watched the whole thing this morning from about 3:30 CDT to touchdown. I was fascinated by it. NASA has a link to a video inside mission control with live radio communications.

Thanks Longhornmaniac for the detailed description of the landing. I can see now why they they will not let it land in bad weather. If it were blown off course it it cant go around. This to seems incredibly risky. Surely small jet engines and a little fuel for a go around would have made good sense. Still no one's needed them yet.

Quoting Glom (Reply 17):What's the point in exhaustively screening for the best pilots only to put them on a robot?

Point Taken Glom

Quoting BCal10 (Reply 18):Thanks Longhornmaniac for the detailed description of the landing. I can see now why they they will not let it land in bad weather. If it were blown off course it it cant go around. This to seems incredibly risky. Surely small jet engines and a little fuel for a go around would have made good sense. Still no one's needed them yet.

Haha, no problem BCal. I agree with you that its incredibly risky but one could argue that that ship doesn't need any more combustibles or explosives on it either.

Quoting Longhornmaniac (Reply 16):Amazingly enough...nope. You'd think something so technologically sophisticated would be, but it still needs a pilot to land.

While the deorbit sequence is, I believe, automated, as pointed out earlier the mission commander pilots it on final approach. From what I remember, NASA and/or Rockwell originally planned for landing to be automated as well, but the astronauts raised a stir about the possibility of the computer lowering the landing gear too early which could have led to a potential catatastrophe. Compare that to Buran which could be flown entirely in an automated mode.

South Carolina - too small to be its own country, too big to be a mental asylum.